| The General Instructions for the Roman Missal indicates that for Opening, Offertory, and Communion the preference should be 1) The Antiphon from the Roman Gradual 2) The Antiphon from the Simple Gradual 3) Another psalm 4) Some other song consistent with the above. Until now, unless one was singing Latin, options 1 and 2 were eliminated, and option 3 was ignored, and option 4 all too often took the form of some banal hymn. "By Flowing Waters" is an english edition of the Simple Gradual (which was prepared under a mandate from the Second Vatican Council), opening the door to the use of sung Scripture in worship. |
| It's one of the ironies of modern Christianity that the churches claiming to make the most of the Bible in their theology make the least of the Bible in their worship. Evangelicals, for all their insistence on the authority, infallibility, and God-givenness of the Bible, have the least biblical worship in Christendom. It is unbiblical not in the sense that it breaks this rule or that, but in the sense that the Bible itself plays little or no role in the language and content of worship. If you visit a "Bible church," for example, you may find that the Bible is a closed book, liturgically speaking. It isn't sung. It isn't prayed. It is a springboard for the sermon, and no more. But if you step into, say, an Anglican or Orthodox church, you find a way of worship much more explicitly biblical. The people hear two or three readings from both the Old and the New Testaments. They sing the Psalms and the Lord's Prayer, and the service includes hymns shot through with scriptural language. The point of the comparison isn't to vilify one church and idealize another. Every tradition has its liabilities. But it does raise a question: What are evangelicals missing that many other Christians aren't? The answer: The other Christians have not forgotten that the Psalms are the church's first and greatest hymnbook. The Psalms have always occupied a central place in private devotion, of course. Jerome, the great fourth-century translator and scholar, reports hearing them sung by people in the fields and in their gardens. But the Psalms were also central to public worship. Psalm-singing churches are following a tradition rooted in the Bible itself. Jesus prayed the Psalms. They were twice on his lips when he was dying. He even said, after his resurrection, that the Psalms really speak of his own suffering and glory. What greater incentive does the Christian need to pray and sing them? "By Flowing Waters" is a collection of biblical songs -- mostly Psalms -- set to some of the most durable and attractive music that the church has produced. The melodies are basically what we're used to calling "Gregorian" or "plainsong" -- unison and unaccompanied. (It's astonishing that churches haven't capitalized on the success of all those popular Gregorian chant CDs. Why don't we get to sing the best examples of plainsong in church? The appetite for such music is clearly there.) Paul F. Ford's settings are intended for antiphonal or responsorial singing. That is, a cantor or choir chants the Psalm, and the congregation sings a brief response (usually a sentence from the Psalm) after every verse or two. But there's nothing to keep a church from learning to sing the whole Psalm. Not all of the Psalms are here, and many that are have been truncated. The translations, from the New Revised Standard Version, will not suit every ear. But one great virtue of this humble music is that it can be adapted to any translation. It could be adapted to the phone book, for that matter. So even if you don't like the New Revised Standard Version, you could use Ford's settings as guide for your own arrangements with another translation. His introductory essay explains how the chants are structured and makes helpful suggestions about singing them. The author and publisher are Catholic, but musicians from other traditions who want to add sung prayer to their churches' worship will find plenty to draw on. Ford invites them to use what they wish. And for anyone who reads music, "By Flowing Waters" wouldn't be bad for private use either. |
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